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Monday Question: Drive Away Browsers And Seek Buyers

A client of mine showed me their blog, and asked: “I’m not happy with the income my blog is generating. Can you help me increase my profit? I run both google adsense and affiliate offers“.

While I can’t show the blog or do a screencapture due to confidentiality reasons, here are some points to help you bring your blog monetization to the next level.

Nothing beats a well-tuned blog. This means tracking your analytics and conversions, and making the improvements and tracking, and repeating the cycle.

Broadly, you need to understand the intention and outcome of every visitor to your blog.

Are they there to browse? To make a comparison? To make a purchase?

I’ve found that AdSense publishing is suited for browsers who are still looking for information and aren’t close to making a buying decision yet.

I’ve found AdSense to provide a fairly low ROI (return on investment), so I’ve focused on my affiliate marketing efforts.

You can’t have it both ways…

It’s unlikely that a visitor will both click on an adsense ad AND buy a product from you – It’s either one or the other.

I’ve heard pseudo blogging “experts” say that you should have both adsense and affiliate offers on your blog, because someone who doesn’t buy, will click on your adsense ads instead.

THIS IS COMPLETE NONSENSE.

If you follow such ill-founded advice, you could possibly wreck your blog income efforts.

Let’s look at this situation logically:

  • If your traffic profile comprises browsers – They’re not likely to buy, just run adsense ads.
  • If your traffic profile comprises buyers – Clicking on an adsense ad means they will head off your blog and you’d lose the sale.

So the bottomline is that you need to choose either to cater to buyers or browsers.

You can convert browsers to buyers if you have compelling content that pre-sells your offers, or if you have established a solid reputation in the marketplace.

More importantly, you need to clearly understand the outcome you want to achieve and have confidence in your ability to achieve it.

If you have strong content creation and selling/marketing skills, I’d suggest you run only affiliate offers on your blog.

Adopt an all-or-nothing effort when it comes to monetizing your traffic and you’ll drive yourself harder to achieve results, and your sales will speak for themselves.

7 comments on Monday Question: Drive Away Browsers And Seek Buyers

  1. Forum Business Blog
    October 23, 2007 at 3:42 am (16 years ago)

    I agree. If you’re selling products, you shouldn’t have adsense on your site.

  2. Marc
    October 23, 2007 at 12:36 pm (16 years ago)

    You mention that guy as a pseudo expert, but you have a testimonial on his page with your picture on it and saying he has a quality product. I think you need to clarify your position on that. Also this guy calls himself the WordPress guy. I thought Matt Mulenweg was the WordPress guy.

  3. Andrew Wee
    October 23, 2007 at 1:09 pm (16 years ago)

    You’re confusing a contextual link with the person I’m refering to.

    I assume you’re refering to Matt Mullenweg?

    Regarding “WordPress guy” or “AdSense guy” there’s no trademark or copyright on that.

    If you’re calling yourself the “WordPress developer”, it carries a whole different meaning.

  4. Primes Genato
    October 24, 2007 at 10:59 am (16 years ago)

    Your “pseudo blogging expert” link points to a Gobala Krishnan site. Ironically, on that same page, you have a testimonial praising that guy’s product.

  5. Andrew Wee
    October 24, 2007 at 12:31 pm (16 years ago)

    As mentioned, it’s a contextual link, rather than an intentional link.

    Syntactically there is nothing wrong with linking “blogging” to Gobala’s site and product for which I’m top all time affiliate.

    Hyperlinking “experts” to the supposed expert should be the one you might be concerned about.

  6. jen_chan, writer SureFireWealth.com
    October 25, 2007 at 8:01 pm (16 years ago)

    For this situation, I think the focus should be on the buyers and not the browsers. After all, isn’t that the ultimate purpose of your Web site? Being fairly new to this whole Internet marketing scene, I haven’t really taken note of such issues. Thank you very much for sharing.

  7. Super Affiliate Blog
    December 6, 2007 at 12:49 pm (16 years ago)

    Forget about AdSense, putting up affiliate offers make so much more money. Even AuctionAds can earn you more money than AdSense, in most cases.

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